The Electronic Intifada 6 June 2024
TikTok ban has been challenged in court.
Cfoto/DPP via ZUMA PressOn 24 April, US President Joe Biden signed a bill that could result in the ban of TikTok in the US.
The bill was part of a foreign aid package of $95.3 billion dollars’ worth of “security aid” to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, with $15 billion going to Israel for purposes including replenishment of its Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Iron Beam air defense systems.
It is no surprise that a bill furthering US funding for imperialism and genocide should also fortify US imperialism on the digital front. The US political establishment’s opposition to TikTok essentially boils down to fear-mongering about how the app’s parent company, ByteDance, will provide American user data to the Chinese Communist Party and that China would use the app to sway US political elections.
These concerns are reminiscent of the wildly exaggerated “Russiagate” story of 2016, which alleged that Russian disinformation handed the White House to Donald Trump. They show how the app is a small symbol in a broader ideological narrative of US imperial anxiety and paranoia that has now fixated on a rising China just as it did with Russia previously.
They also arguably reflect a fear born of consciousness of a slackening hold on the ability to manufacture consent for imperialism writ large, especially among younger people, with whom the app is not only popular, but has emerged as a news source in its own right.
Palestine role
And it’s no secret that Palestine plays an outsized role in this equation.
“We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem,” Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt remarked in a leaked audio recording. “The same brains that gave us Taglit, the same brains that gave us all of these amazing other innovations, need to put our energy towards this, like fast.”
As James Wright observes, while this is not the first time that US politicians have fomented about the need to ban TikTok, the beginning of Israel’s latest genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has escalated political anxieties about the app as users flock to TikTok to dismantle Zionist propaganda and express support for Palestinian liberation.Wright notes that in November, 25 Republicans signed a letter denouncing what they identified as a “deluge of pro-Hamas” TikTok material, and Republican Senator Josh Hawley claimed there is “a ubiquity of anti-Israel content” on the app.
Accusations of the app’s alleged political support for Palestine converge with the broader manufactured narrative that TikTok is a Chinese threat undermining the US and bolstering the CCP through peddling “pro-Hamas” propaganda.
For its part, TikTok has denied these claims, asserting, as reporting in Vice frames it, that “it’s not the algorithm, teens are just pro-Palestine.”
Indeed, as other writers have noted, TikTok’s algorithms promote content through self-selection, meaning that users are likely to be recommended material based on what they have previously sought out on the app.
It’s not the technocratic dimensions of TikTok’s operations, but the ideological project their users are directly challenging, that is ultimately the heart of the issue.
Digital/settler-colonialism
The TikTok ban and the broader, post 7 October campaign against the app, reflect an intriguing example of what I have lately been referring to as digital/settler-colonialism, by which I mean the coming together of Israeli settler-colonialism and the interests of Big Tech companies.
As reflected by the recent emergence of groups like “Iron Truth” which pressure tech companies to remove Palestine-focused content, Israel has for years engaged in a process of silencing Palestinians and material supporting their liberation struggle on digital platforms.
Digital/settler-colonialism is the process whereby the designs and political pressure of Zionist settler-colonialism align successfully with the efforts of profit-driven, anti-democratic Big Tech companies.
To that end, the mechanics of the actual TikTok ban would leverage and strengthen US tech hegemony by forcing ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app to an American company, are important to note.
For its part, US Big Tech has been more than happy to oblige Israel’s settler-colonially derived censorship directives.
Meta’s censorship of Palestinian voices and Palestine-related content has grown so egregious that in December 2023, Human Rights Watch dedicated an entire report to the issue.
Even the suggestion that a rival tech company is refusing to toe the line is no doubt cause for considerable panic among political and tech elites when the mandate to manufacture unquestioning consent for Israel’s latest genocide is at an all-time high – even as the optics of genocide are firmly outside the realm of deniability.
Not about the app
On 7 May, TikTok sued the US government, arguing the potential ban was unconstitutional and “subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide.”
Of course, it’s not really about the app. At the end of the day, TikTok is an independent company concerned first and foremost with its popularity and success.
And as we saw in 2021 when activists from Sheikh Jarrah used social media as a tool in their broader campaign to stop their looming expulsion, today activists are utilizing the latest digital tools at their disposal to redirect the normative digital dynamics of passive consumption and entertainment towards challenging imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism.
Indeed, the app has been a powerful instrument for amplifying the messaging of student activists across the country who are taking part in encampments to call for an end to genocide and university investments in Zionist settler-colonialism.
Today it is TikTok. Tomorrow it will be the newest platform, the latest technology, as activists continue to put their bodies on the line for an end to genocide and the complete liberation of Palestinian land and people.
Omar Zahzah is a writer, poet, organizer, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University. His book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler-Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle is forthcoming from The Censored Press in Fall 2025.
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